So, I clicked on the link at the top of the sub’s page about White Sox cutting payroll for next year.

And the comment section is nearly unreadable with how it’s organized. I’ve never seen comments organized in this way before in any other sub.

Odds on Cole actually opting out? https://bvmsports.com/2024/09/16/6-mlb-standouts-who-could-become-intriguing-free-agents/

I don't have cable and used to have YouTube TV. What is the best and most affordable path to watching mlb playoffs online (ie youtube tv, fubo, slimg)? I'd want something that carries the networks that will broadcast the games.

Per MLBTR, he "suffered a setback" yesterday in his throwing arm.

Multiple points of note, mainly connected to the Dodgers' blowing the doors off on free agency and contract extensions in the offseason.

1. This is why these spending blowouts guarantee nothing.

2. Will this increase the talk of Ohtani pitching in the postseason? (The piece goes on to discuss the Dodgers' current rotation situation in detail.)

3. Not related to the Dodgers, but, the coming offseason: Will this further impact the next round of FA for the likes of Blake Snell, who has his own injury history?

Merrill is currently -800 and chourio is +3000 for ROY.

Merrill’s stats: .288 avg, .319 OBP, .816 OPS. 23 homers and 16 steals. 3.7 WAR

Chourio: .276 avg, .330 OBP, .808 OPS. 21 homers and 20 steals. 4.1 WAR

I’m fine with Merrill being favored but why the MASSIVE gap?? These stats are very similar yet the betting market is saying this race isn’t close. What gives? Does anybody have a legit reason other than Merrill has had more “clutch” moments?

Welcome to the r/MLB Push to the Playoffs Discussion Thread! As we get closer to the 2024 postseason, this thread should be used for:

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I also support arsenal in the english premier league and i dont have an nba or nfl team but whatever mlb team i choose lets say the orioles ill root for the city of Baltimore if u understand but i really do love teams with great atmospheres been watching baseball i really like the mets phillies orioles and mariners and the giants had barry bonds i think his name is i was watching videos on him wow he hits the ball hard hes kind of what got me into the sport of baseball but aswell my grandad was from new york so could go mets I HATE THE YANKEES so definitely not them and i have family in miami so then i could also go with miami

Not asking what you would prefer personally, or what you’re hoping would happen for your favorite team. What would be the most entertaining series this year, even if it doesn’t seem totally possible? Based on the players, rivalries, anything. What teams and why?

Just noticed Jorge Soler doesn’t have his name on his jersey but all the other Braves players do. Any idea why?

r/MLB - Los Angeles Dodgers VS Atlanta Braves [Game Thread]

Welcome to the 2024 Regular Season between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Atlanta Braves. As the game is happening, meet new users, reply with other fans, and type out your reactions as each play happens during the game! From the first pitch to the final out!

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What would the local crappy beer be at a Cincinnati Reds game be?

Because of how unpredictable it can be to get a draftee from the draft to the MLB, it does not have the same amount of interest from baseball fans as the other four sports (except maybe for soccer).

What made MLB decide to start rotating draft locations?

Late July (25?)1956, he became the first (and still the only) MLB hitter to do this:

•Walk-Off • Inside-the-Park • Grand Slam

why did that change and at what level does it start?

On 10 August, the Tigers were 11 games back of the final wild card slot; if the Reds hold on against Minnesota today, Detroit will be 1.5 games out. They have the best record in the AL since 1 July, and have one of the best team ERAs in that time despite leaning almost exclusively on bullpen arms. All this from a team that started the season with the goal of letting their prospects play and seeing what the future holds. Instead, they are playing outstanding baseball and finding themselves right in the thick of things, the fanbase is rightfully ecstatic. It's that last part that is the core of my argument: more teams being in the playoff hunt later into the season is great for the sport, because it keeps more fans engaged longer, and nothing pulls in new fans like wanting to be a part of a playoff push.

EDIT: to be clear, I don't want more teams in the playoffs than we currently have. I think 12 out of 30 is a good balance, and any more than that would be too much (unless the league eventually expands to 32 teams).

TL;DR: expanded playoffs keep more fanbases engaged later into the season, which is a net positive for the future of baseball.

r/MLB - Cincinnati Reds VS Minnesota Twins [Game Thread]

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Why did Ticketmaster change the name of the A’s from the Oakland Athletics to The Athletics?

The MVP race has always fascinated me. Who is the most important person to dress up for 162 games? It then brings in this debate of value over skill. Everyone has a different idea of what ‘Most Valuable’ means. To me, value is subjective. You might be willing to pay $50 for a Max Scherzer rookie card. To you it’s worth $50, but to someone else it may be worth $100. Player value, to me, then varies by the team who holds that player. 

This is where my post comes in. My job has me using baseball statistics to prototype an algorithm that can ‘find’ a player’s value to their particular team. While it’s been a fun way to spend work hours, it also provides some neat perspective to who the most valuable players in the league are (if you consider value to be subjective). wPC varies based on the performance of the other players on the team, so it’s important to understand wPC isn’t telling you who the ‘best’ player in the league is, but rather who has been more consequential in their team’s successes.

In our previous post, we highlighted 10 teams with top MVP candidates. In it, we received a good bit of critical feedback that we addressed and we now feel pretty good about where we’ve landed as we get our first iteration including the entire league. If you’re interested in the details of how we got our list, feel free to read at the end of the post. 

Each player has a ‘wPC’ rating which is for all intents and purposes, team value, and ‘iPC’ which is for all intents and purposes, an elaborate WAR-like statistic used to help get our wPC value. 

1. Aaron Judge - iPC: 8.32 - wPC: 21.22

Shocker! The best hitter in baseball (who also plays the field) is at the top. In our last post of the alg, we had Aaron Judge a bit lower, mostly due to his lack of clutch hitting. Something we overlooked is clutch performance in relation to the rest of the league. To be clear, Aaron Judge hits MUCH worse in high leverage situations than otherwise, but that doesn’t mean he hits much worse than the rest of the league in high leverage situations. It turns out Judge is always a really good hitter. So after completely reworking our own Clutch metric to consider normals for performance, Judge shoots up this list and easy holds the #1 spot in both iPC and wPC.

2. Bobby Witt Jr. - iPC: 7.57 - wPC: 19.64

2nd in WAR, 1st in BA, 2nd in SLG, 3rd in OPS, 11 triples, 30 home runs, and playing a premier position, there are only a handful of players in the league that can do what he’s doing, overshadowed only by Judge’s incredible season.

3. Francisco Lindor - iPC: 5.50 - wPC: 18.23

Despite his iPC ranking 10th in the league, he gets the 3rd highest wPC and 1st in the NL. He sat out a game against the Phillies for quite literally carrying the Mets’ season on his back. The rest of this team is pretty mediocre, so it’s no surprise to see him this high on the list of valuable players.

4. Paul Skenes - iPC: 4.85 - wPC: 18.14

It doesn’t seem like that long ago since he made his debut yet he’s already racked up over 5 WAR and has looked every part the ace the Pirates were hoping for. Admittedly, I don’t know too much about his game beyond what numbers I can see in front of me, but 14th in the league in iPC and landing as the most valuable player the Pirates have tells me what I need to know. This dude is going to be a menace for a really long time.

5. Hunter Greene - iPC: 5.19 - wPC: 18.04

Yet another pitcher that is outperforming the rest of his team by a large margin, it is a big reason you see these guys above more prominent names, notably Ohtani and Henderson. These players are playing on mid teams and a huge reason why they’re not a complete trainwreck like the Rockies and White Sox.

6. Juan Soto - iPC: 6.82 - wPC: 17.39

This surprises me a bit only because of how good Judge has been this year. After all, with wPC being weighted on team performance, the better your peers play, the harder it is to earn wPC. That said, both Judge and Soto are having MVP-caliber seasons, so a list in which he isn’t included would feel like we got the numbers wrong. He may not be as important to the Yankees successes this year, but he is still a major reason they are atop their division.

7. Tarik Skubal - iPC: 5.57 - wPC: 17.17

Another pitcher and another team around .500. It goes to show that quality pitching can only get you so far. These pitchers have won more games than they lost (even if their personal Win column doesn’t suggest it) and without their performances their teams would be a dumpster-fire. Tarik Skubal is having a Cy Young season stuck on a team not ready to make a playoff push. He is vital to the Tigers respectability. 

8. Jarren Duran - iPC: 6.62 - wPC: 17.15

Jarren, like the other players here on middling teams, is a major reason for them still hanging around .500. What wPC intends to build is that he has been a major factor in 17 of their wins this season. Maybe he hit a go-ahead homerun in the 7th. Maybe he had 4 RBIs when they won 9-7. Regardless, without him, there is a variability that they could have lost an additional 17 games, depending on his replacement, showing how crucial he has been to a Boston team that will likely miss the postseason this year. 

9. Tyler Anderson - iPC: 3.57 - wPC: 16.92

I know I’m going to get downvoted for this one because people will refuse to accept Tyler Anderson as the ‘9th most valuable player’ in the league… And here, I agree with you… somewhat. Anderson actually ranks 32nd in iPC. He’s having a very good year. Good enough for a CY? No. Good enough to carry the Angels to the playoffs? No. But this is more of an insult to the rest of the Angels roster than anything. Despite not having a top-tier iPC, he still lands in the top 10 because of the sheer lack of talent around him. Zach Neto lands just behind him at 34th in iPC, but to find the next best Angels player, you have to drop down to Ben Joyce at 199th. So Tyler finds himself here as one of 2 bright spots for a terrible team.

10. Gunnar Henderson - iPC: 6.51 - wPC: 16.89

Obviously a great player, an MVP candidate, a future face of the MLB. Gunnar lands on the list of top 10’s here, but hits the last spot, again, not due to a lack of skill on his behalf, but the immense skill across the entire Baltimore roster. Baltimore leads the league in positive wPC players at 40. Craig Kimbrel and Cade Povich lead the team as the least valuable players on the team, but they actually land in the middle of the league in wPC. Their team is generally so well rounded compared to the rest of the league, that every win is well distributed amongst the roster, keeping Henderson from gaining a couple extra points and getting to the top 5-6 on this list.

14. Shohei Ohtani - iPC: 6.55 - wPC: 16.40

I had to add Shohei because 1. Everyone is going to ask where he is and 2. Everyone is going to complain that he’s not number 1… So I need space to explain myself. If you are upset with seeing Ohtani at #14, you are not understanding the intent of this stat. Ohtani stands at 6th in iPC and 1st in the NL. Using pure skill as the threshold, Ohtani is the best of the best… But that doesn’t mean he is vital to the Dodgers success… As is the intent of wPC. Ohtani sits ahead of 2 other future Hall of Famers. The Dodgers are 2nd in positive wPC players with 39 players, and with the exceptions of Walker Buehler and Bobby Miller, the Dodgers as a whole have some really solid numbers across the board. Does this mean Ohtani sucks? Obviously not. But it means if he wasn’t on the roster, there’s a good chance they still land the top wild card spot and may even keep the division lead. Thus, he sits at #14 on the list. He is a generational talent on a generational team. 

Thank you for reading, enjoy the rest of your day. If you care at all to know the workings of the algorithm, everything is explained below…

___________________________________

Firstly, I’d like to point out that this is being developed as a testing ground for a sports video game in development (unrelated to baseball). The plan is to install a revolutionary matchmaking design that uses performances to gauge team value as a way to matchmake and record data. However, since the game is not released or yet in extensive playtesting, getting the data needed to test and develop the algorithm is impossible. Therefore, baseball being as stat heavy as it is, makes for a great platform to commit research. Being a huge baseball fan, I figured I’d also share my findings to both critique my work as it is being developed and show a new facet of baseball using a stat design that does not yet exist. So that’s the back story. If you disagree with its findings, that’s fine, we are ultimately shaping it for a different need than baseball performances. Additionally, it prohibits me from actually releasing the inner workings of the stat, at least while it’s being actively developed for research, so again, I apologize.

wPC stands for ‘winning Player Contribution’, meaning the amount of wins the player has contributed to. Unlike WAR which is trying to determine how many wins a player is worth, ie. How many less wins you’d have without the player, predicting wins can be tricky because WAR ignores situational performance. Situational performance is tricky because it is volatile. So wPC uses a really frustratingly complicated method at getting an objective, non-volatiles Clutch metric and a WAR-like metric and fusing the results to the actual team performance. The end result becomes how many wins the player has contributed to. This value is team dependent and focuses on directly the impact the player has had in the season. 

iPC stands for ‘independent Player Contribution’. This is essentially WAR. We basically had to redesign our own WAR so that it could be more context dependent and also so we understood it better for our actual intended use. iPC is independent of team value and performance and instead focuses on what the actual player did, context independent, so it ignores leveraged situations, etc. We then take this value and do a bunch of fanciness to get our wPC, so wPC is directly tied to this stat. 

A couple important things to note: 

First, Clutch is a part of this stat. That pisses people off because Clutch can be random and volatile… However, we noted this criticism and built our own Clutch metric that is normalized with the rest of the league. What this means, is we’ve removed the volatility from it and as performances around the league change, so do the values used to calculate Clutch. 

Additionally, we realized that Clutch is a comparative stat between one’s own performances and not against the league as a whole. So our Clutch metric actually corrects this, ensuring that just because Judge performs worse in high-leverage situations than he does in low-leverage, he didn’t see a hit to his wPC if his high-leverage performance is still better than others in a similar context. 

Second, This isn’t some argument that Person A should get Award B over Player C. I truly do not care about the outcome of awards. This happens to align with work I need to do, and it happens to align with a controversial MVP race between Ohtani and Lindor, who happens to be on the Mets as I happen to be a Mets fan lol. I’m having the same philosophical debate as you as to who should get it. Ultimately it depends on what your definition of MVP is. Ohtani is 1st in overall performance. Lindor is 1st in team value. Do what you will with that information.

Third, if you want to see any further values ie. You’re a Braves fan and want to see how the whole roster shakes out, let me know and I will respond with those. If you want to know about a specific player, let me know and I can respond with their values. 

Finally, if you have any critiques, I’m more than happy to hear them. We’ve tested our new algorithm pretty extensively and feel pretty good about where it’s ended up. We feel we are getting exactly the desired/expected results that we should be and it’s unlikely we’ll do anything more than minor tweaking at this point, but the only way to get better is for someone to tell you you can do better, so I’m always welcome to hear what people have to say. 

That’s all, have a great day!

Every time I look at the wildcard race the tigers are inching closer and closer to that final spot.

Nobody really talks about the tigers because they haven’t been relevant since like damn near 2016 but they really look good right now.

Not to mention all their best players are very young and they have arguably a top pitching staff in the league this year.

The tigers are 21-9 since the return of kerry carpenter and Riley Greene. Parker Meadows is emerging as a star on both sides of the ball. Colt Keith has looked solid as a rookie so far. If Torkelson gets his shit together and the tigers pick up a slugger that can bat cleanup and maybe a veteran bat in this lineup are they contenders next season???

The problem with them is their inconsistent offense. They lead the league in 1 run games and win a lot of games 2-1 or 3-2 and also lose a lot of games like that as well. If they can get a little bit better offensively I think they take that next step considering since they have been healthy they have been winning and winning against good teams. Won series against Yankees, Red Sox, Mariners, Dodgers.

They had an argument for best 1-2-3 punch before the flaherty trade in skubal-flaherty-olson but then the flaherty trade and olson injury and they really only have 2 starting pitchers right now and they seem to never give up run. Over half their runs are kenta maeda which is another thing. Tigers are paying Javy Baez and kenta maeda the most money on the team….. imagine if they could get outta that situation and deepen the roster. I guess what I’m saying is are the tigers back for the foreseeable future??